Good bye baby

Double Indemnity (1944)

Bill Wilder directs Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in this film noir based on the novel of the same name. An insurance sales man falls in love with a married woman and they plot to kill her husband so she can collect the insurance money and they can be together.

This is an interesting film as it was a ground breaker in a number of ways. There were several attempts by studios to option the novel the film is based on when it first went into print but the studios could not find a way to get it passed the code of conduct which they had to work under, even ten years later when the film was finally made there was still a battle to get the script cleared. Stylistically this was also one of the classic and defining entries into the film noir genre that came to have a large influence on Hollywood for the next fifteen years or more.

Unusually the story is told from the point of view of one of the murderers, while this is often the case in other crime films such as heist films it is pretty hard to warm an audience up to cold blooded killers. For the most part the film is really well made and the plot unravels really well with some great tension and atmosphere. The only problem I have is how quickly the sales man falls under the femme fatale's spell is a little unbelievable in my opinion but this can be put down to the film making constraints of the time. In it's time this film was revolutionary and still holds up today but some of the impact is probably lost on modern viewers due to the unrestricted nature of film making that has followed.

4/5 a real genre classic.